


You and You and Me Make We

by Wardhome



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BDSM, Backstory, F/F, F/M, Multi, Slow Burn, Threesome - F/F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-16 21:09:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28837587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wardhome/pseuds/Wardhome
Summary: How three people became a threesome, despite psychological issues, social awkwardness, death, and eldritch killing machines.And by slow burn, I mean slooooow burn.
Relationships: Kelly Chambers/Liara T'Soni, Kelly Chambers/Male Shepard, Kelly Chambers/Male Shepard/Liara T'Soni, Male Shepard/Liara T'Soni
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	1. For the Longest Time: Liara

Liara T'Soni was not like other asari.

There were several reasons for this, a few of which she understood and a few of which she had a hard time admitting to herself.

The first reason that she was not like other asari was the circumstances of her conception. She was what was called a "pureblood" due to the fact that her mother, Benezia T'Soni, had had her with another asari.

In other societies, this would have been considered something of a compliment. In asari society, however, it was the equivalent of calling someone inbred. Due to their somewhat unique reproductive system, which involved copying desired traits from their partner and then incorporating them with their own, asari society had always been maniacally exogamist, to the point where it had never been considered quite proper to have children with someone who lived within a day's walk. In fact, incest was the one sexual act that was forbidden even if "proper" consent had been obtained, and when they got around to defining incest legally the Asari Republics extended it to third cousins, a proposition that was nearly defeated because many thought it didn't extend out far enough.

As with humans, there were also certain genetic disorders that cropped up more often when close relatives had kids. Unlike with humans, some of those disorders could kill others, not just the carrier.  
So, when the asari reached the stars, found the salarians, and discovered, much to their delight, that their reproductive systems could incorporate desired traits from other sapient species (Attempts on the part of deviants to have children with Thessia's wildlife...did not go well. For anyone involved. No one was entirely sure why, but it was suspected but never proven that proper pattern pulling required an actual meld, and melding with a non-sapient entity was impossible.) the previously mentioned exogamy had a new outlet.

For a few decades, no salarian went to Thessia or any asari colony world unless they were actively seeking out a sexual partner (a rarity among the species, due to their method of reproduction) or were willing to put up with constant flirtation and propositions. For a species that was close to being asexual, it could be extremely annoying.

This same pattern repeated itself as first contact was made with the krogan, hanar, elcor, turians, volus, and batarians, and by the time Liara was born, having a child with another asari was considered the equivalent of a human having a child with their fourth or fifth cousin--not illegal, not even necessarily immoral, but certainly not something respectable people did or talked about doing. After all, taking information from another asari did nothing to improve the species, whereas pulling from members of other species could add desirable traits to the gene pool. 

As a result, had Liara been born to someone other than Benezia T'Soni, she would have been treated much like an illegitimate child on Earth--if not socially ostracized completely, certainly maltreated, and with a strike against her already. 

However, this was not the case, for the second reason that she was not like other asari. She was Benezia T'Soni's and Aethyta Megara's daughter. Both were matriarchs and, if not the most influential within the Asari Republics, still had considerable pull.

Benezia's influence was more obvious--no one wanted to arouse her ire by blatantly mistreating her daughter, which meant she didn't have to deal with a lot of the bullying and exclusion most others like her did. However, there was always an underlying tension wherever Liara went, and she knew it, a tension that always made social gatherings intensely awkward for her.

Aethyta's influence was rather subtler. She knew she had no right to be in Liara's life after leaving her and Nezzie, but she'd sooner cut her own throat than not try and ease her daughter's way a little. It wasn't much--making sure that her dorm mates were all intensely interested in martial arts, for example, or seeing to it that one of the college administrators who'd expressed the opinion that having children with another Asari should be banned ended up transferring elsewhere. She wasn't going to completely shield her daughter from prejudice, she'd need to know how to deal with it, but there was no reason for her to have to experience the worst forms of it. 

Third, she was intensely interested in the past, largely because of the aforementioned issues. She knew her presence made things awkward for everyone, she hated it when she heard whispered conversations go silent when she walked by, and while no one actively mistreated her she had very few actual friends instead of girls who were just hoping to get in good with Benezia T'Soni's heir. She'd had to learn how to tell the difference by the time she left primary school. As a result, she spent a lot of time in either the school library or the public library. After all, the books didn't want anything from her or hold it against her that she was a pureblood who would have to go above and beyond in order to contribute to the species as much as someone whose pattern donor was an alien.

One of those books was an extraordinarily well-written work about the Protheans, the precursor civilization that was considered the primary candidates for having built the Citadel and the mass relays. This spawned her interest in xenoarchaeology. Once she realized that this field got her as far away from her mother's career choice as possible and would entail going to remote worlds where she might be the only person around, she made the decision and never turned back. 

Fourth, surprisingly enough, Benezia was actually attentive to Liara and raised her well, which, while common among asari as a whole, was not nearly as common among asari politicians. She was able to recognize that Liara had no head for politics and wasn't fond of schmoozing or socializing, and mostly just wanted to be left alone and contribute to society in her own way, in a field that would allow her to stand on her own merits.

Fifth, by the time she went off to college, she was extremely attractive and didn't really have a clue. The attractiveness was because of her parents--the mixing of their traits had conspired to produce a perfectly proportioned asari body, and one that responded quite well to even minimal exercise, especially the calorie-burning use of biotics. The cluelessness was because she carried over into her secondary education years the assumption that when people didn't actually want to be friends with her but just wanted something from her that it was some kind of political thing rather than them trying to get her naked. This, despite the fact that asari sex ed included things like "how to tell if someone wants to have sex with you."

At any rate, by the time she made it to the University of Armali, all of these factors had combined to produce an extraordinarily smart, capable, driven, extremely attractive, socially oblivious wallflower. 

By the time she left Thessia, essentially for good except to visit, doctorate in xenoarchaeology in hand, all of these characteristics had only been accentuated. This was partially due to the aforementioned dorm mates, who had ended up practically dragging her to self-defense classes when they heard what she wanted to do with her life, which would entail going out to what was lawless space, and were also somewhat intimidated by the fact that she was able to simultaneously maintain the highest GPA possible while taking the maximum possible courseload and keeping up with twice-weekly classes and a fairly rigorous exercise regimen. This meant that the only people with whom she had regular social contact considered her out of their league, which meant that, by the end of their second year together, they'd all thoroughly friendzoned her out of sheer despair.

Liara, as it happened, had done the same thing with her dorm mates and for the same reasons, which led to a self-reinforcing cycle wherein she threw herself even more into her work, thereby further socially isolating herself, which led to her despairing of finding romantic attraction, thereby causing her to throw herself even more into her work. In the meantime, half the students in the xenoarchaeology department's sexual fantasies featured her on a regular basis and the other half weren't into asari. 

Academically, however, it was a much different story. Liara's parentage ensured that others made sure that she knew about internships and potential opportunities to go along on field expeditions, and while she was savvy enough to not turn down such even though she knew she wasn't finding out about them because of her own merits, she was also determined enough to show that she was worthy of consideration that by the time she was embarking on her doctorate her being Matriarch Benezia's daughter was considered a side bonus to her presence on an expedition.

Her excavations were pristine, her record-keeping immaculate, and while her people-management skills were occasionally lacking she was never outright cruel, rude, or predatory. Furthermore, her analyses were always well-reasoned and never veered off into wild speculation or claimed more than the evidence suggested. 

This, however, was largely because she was observant enough to know that a conclusion she'd come to about the Protheans was not one that would be welcomed by the xenoarchaeology community, and so she'd decided to keep her mouth shut about it until she get some hard evidence and her doctorate rather than just guesswork and a hunch. Specifically, she had this nagging feeling that someone or something had gone to some lengths to erase all evidence of the Protheans' existence, and, more frighteningly, that the Protheans weren't the first species to have such a thing happen to them.

Which meant that the same thing might happen to her people. And that, she decided, would be her contribution--finding out what had destroyed those who came before the Asari, so that they might avoid the same fate. 

When she graduated, therefore, she threw herself into her work even harder, making solitary expeditions into uncharted space, frequently going months or years at a time without more than passing conversations with a resupply crew. What papers she wrote were rare but highly sought after, although her constant hinting that the Prothean extinction might not have been natural and might have been part of a cycle was usually treated with great skepticism and in some cases outright derision by most of her colleagues.

She also ended up having to defend herself against pirates and slavers on a few occasions, though fewer than one might have expected, given where she tended to excavate and just how long her solitary sojourn lasted. It didn't take long for word to get around that the lone asari archaeologist might look like easy prey but was _not_ worth the trouble.

By coincidence, she was on one of her rare long stays in what might have been called "civilized" space when the turians welcomed humanity onto the galactic scene by opening fire on their ships and taking over one of their planets. She followed it avidly, as most asari did, and like most found that her sympathies lay with the humans, since the turians hadn't even bothered to ask them not to open the Mass Relay before they started shooting.

This feeling was only intensified when the first images of humans leaked onto the extranet, especially for Liara. The human phenotype was much closer to the asari one than any other species besides the drell, and since it had been a century or two since a new species had been discovered this immediately fueled much speculation, particularly among those Liara knew and Liara herself, about what it would be like to meld with them. Or just have sex with them.

Which was a desire that Liara was feeling for the first time in a decade.

However, her quest to try and find out what exactly had happened to the Protheans and their predecessors overrode her curiosity about what it would be like to hop in bed with a human, and so, once she was able to secure funding and publish her most recent findings, she was off again.

That particular expedition took about two years, and by the time she got back to asari space, this time for a conference on the current state of Prothean research, the humans had taken Citadel Space by storm. There were even a few at the conference, interestingly enough, and they were in quite high demand, mostly because the less hidebound researchers thought that their lack of exposure to the millennia of scholarship on the topic might offer some new perspectives. 

However, thanks to her reputation as a brilliant researcher who was also something of a crank, she was able to inveigle her way into a couple of dinners that happened to include humans, and came to the following conclusions.

First, the humans did have a lot to offer to the field. It was readily apparent that their history was very different from that of any of the other species in Citadel space, as their interpretation of the Protheans was very different from any of the other species. Asari tended to view them as enlightened scholars, the turians as protectors, the salarians saw them as scientists, the hanar tended to view them as the next best thing to gods, and no one knew what the batarian researchers really thought. The humans seemed to be split on what exactly the Protheans were, but they seemed rather more cynical about it, viewing them as standard empire builders. The thought made her uncomfortable, but it would shake up the current debate. 

That they seemed somewhat more receptive than her colleagues to her notions regarding what had happened to the Protheans and their predecessors, she allowed, might be clouding her judgment.

Second, they had a lot to offer the galaxy. None of the researchers at this conference were older than fifty, but they were already quite accomplished. Admittedly, this was because they only lived as long as the turians or quarians, apparently--she knew that much--but there was a certain verve to them that the other species didn't have. 

Which, third, she found to be incredibly attractive. As in, sexually. The only reason she didn't proposition any of the humans there was because she was unfamiliar with their sexual customs, beyond knowing that they were rather less freewheeling than the asari's (which was very standard) and she didn't want to be rude. However, she resolved to familiarize herself with said customs, in order that she might be able to do so later.

Therefore, when she left for her next expedition, she had several dozen books about human sexuality and human history. She wanted to find out what made these people tick.

And proceeded to discover that talking about there being one unified "human culture" was even less true than any of the other species. The Systems Alliance, as near as she could tell, was even less cohesive than the Asari Republics, and had not had any real political authority until after first contact with the turians.

To make her quest even more complicated, this extended even into the realm of sexual mores, with a truly bewildering array not only of levels of acceptance of abnormal sexual practices, but what was defined as an abnormal sexual practice, and how it was considered proper to tell someone that you wanted to have sex with them. However, a common thread was that while it was fairly obvious that while casual sexual encounters were not unknown among humans, approaching them for such was apparently a matter of some delicacy, rather than the straightforward approach.

It was enough to drive a girl to despair.

Exasperatedly, when she returned to settled space, she went to Thessia to not only get funding for her next expedition while doing the write-up for the one she'd just finished, but also to talk with Kalria C'ril, one of her few real childhood friends and a professor of xenology to not only vent but to ask her advice.

After nearly ten minutes of summarizing what she'd learned in terms that caused her friend to have to suppress her laughter, she finished with, "I just don't understand why humans have to wrap it in so many circumlocutions and curlicues? And why does it seem like they almost fetishize monogamy?"

Karlia laughed. "Ha! I knew it had to happen eventually. Something finally had to get your motor running, and when the humans showed up I should have guessed they would do it."

Liara felt her face, along with other parts of her body, heat up a little. "Karlia, this is serious," she muttered. 

Her friend sobered. "I'm sorry, Li." She sighed. "Permit me to go into lecture mode?"

Liara nodded. Karlia loved sharing knowledge, had a tendency to let that love run away with her, and fortunately knew it. "I did ask you," she pointed out.

"True. Anyway, the long and the short of it is their biology."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. Think about it. What are the things that, more than any other, distinguish us from the other species?"

Liara knew the answer to this one. "The meld, and we're monogender."

Karlia nodded. "Exactly. We have nearly absolute control over our reproductive system and whether or not we will bear children, we can read our partners' emotions and determine their motives, and we have no sexual dimorphism whatsoever because we only have one sex. Even then, we still have instances where pattern donors will abandon their children," Liara felt a pang at that, "actual infidelity, and various other abuses.

"Now think about the humans. It was not until the past two centuries that they had access to reliable birth control, and only within the past fifty years that they've managed to make it certain to work. Furthermore, because they don't have the meld, it's extremely difficult for them to determine their partner's actual motives, and they have to deduce them by their actions or hope that they've guessed their intentions and character right. Also, remember, they don't live as long as we do, so life-mating for them doesn't have nearly as much of a chance of becoming stagnant, and, also, bearing and raising a child takes up a significantly greater portion of their lifespan. For them, for millennia, strict monogamy was the best way to protect both partners, especially the female, and their children.

"Of course, there were abuses, as there always are, exacerbated by the sexual dimorphism. But it seems very telling to me that it was those human cultures than were the most monogamous that also treated their females...shall we say, the least inequitably.

"And that's also why the circumlocutions are there, particularly for the development of long-term relationships. They're commitment tests. Humans can't afford to waste time in a relationship that's going nowhere the way we can."

Once it was put that way, all of it made a lot more sense. Unfortunately, it didn't help her with her main problem, which was figuring out how to inveigle her way into a human's bed. Man or woman didn't especially matter, they both had their good points. 

"So, do you have any advice?" she asked.

Karlia shrugged. "Not really. You know I've been bonded with Aeneas Samnus for the past twenty years, and I am quite content with him," she said, adding a very salacious intonation on the word "quite." "The best advice I can give you, Li, and I say this as your friend, don't try casual. You've never done casual with anything in your life, don't try it with a relationship."

That was also quite true, and Liara took her friend's advice to heart. Unfortunately, over the next several years, it became readily obvious that as long as she was going out to uncharted space all the time and only coming back for, at most, six-month intervals and spending most of that time in a small apartment turning her most recent findings into an article (she was well on her way, by this point, to being able to turn her collected articles into a book), her chances of meeting and wooing a human interested in an actual relationship was very low.

It was also during this time that she had a falling-out with her mother. Benezia's support only went so far, apparently, and after the fifth time in in a row that Benezia's message boiled down to "attempt to browbeat my daughter into coming back to Thessia and jumping into politics" Liara sent her a message saying that she was doing her work for the Asari people and that until she understood that it would be best if they didn't speak to each other. Later, she would wonder if this was an attempt on Benezia's part to force a breach in order to keep Saren from trying to use her as leverage. 

Despite that, Liara's life continued much as it had been (aside, that is, from the addition of a small but fairly tasteful and high-quality human/asari pornography and erotica collection to her omni-tool), until 2182, when she got a grant to excavate the Prothean ruins on Therum, one large enough to allow her to spend a few years there. 

This excited her for a couple of reasons. First, the ruins were both extensive and largely unexplored, which meant there was a good chance that she'd find something new. Second, there was also a small human colony on the planet, which meant there was a decent chance that she might find someone interested in what a human might think of as a medium-term relationship. 

Therefore, it was with great anticipation that she packed up and headed off.

* * *

**A/N: If the discussion about desirable genetic traits makes you think the Asari have a mild case of eugenics, that is a completely accurate description of the Asari mentality towards the matter. And if you don't think that would mess with Liara's thinking a bit, even though she was raised in a loving and supportive environment, you're kidding yourself. She even brings it up in one of her conversations with Shepard in the first Mass Effect, and obviously expects it to be an issue.**

**Also, before someone tells me about some matriarchal polygamist tribe somewhere, let me remind you that Karlia is talking in generalities. She's not giving Liara the scholarly review version.**


	2. For the Longest Time: John I

John Shepard was not like other boys.

There were several reasons for this.

First, there was his conception. Both of his parents were rather bright and reasonably naturally healthy people, but when Thomas Shepard's sperm met Amelia Shepard's egg the resultant combination produced a child who was in the 99th percentile both in terms of intellectual and baseline physical capability, as well as the capacity to improve both.

Second, there were his parents. Thomas and Amelia were both science-fiction fans and found Earth to be rather stifling, and so had decided to go to the stars the moment they had the opportunity, and were among the first colonists on Mindoir, which was where they ended up having John. They were also conscientious, thoughtful people, and by the time John was halfway through primary school had realized that he was, frankly, smarter and stronger and faster than everyone else--and knew it. 

While the raising they'd already given him would have prevented him from becoming a monster, they didn't just want to raise a child who wasn't a terrible human being--they wanted to raise one who could help others to be better. But they were wise enough to know that pushing their child too far and too hard could create what they feared. 

So they nudged him, gently, getting him to play soccer and lacrosse while going into more advanced studies in school. It didn't take any encouraging in either case once he got started--John loved the challenge of it. 

And they read to him, and to his sister, who had been born two years after him and was as bright and capable as he. They always had, of course, but now it was more purposeful. They read to them stories of those who used their abilities to protect others, and keep them safe, but never forced their will upon others, for such was not right. 

Third, there was Mindoir itself. There was a whole world out there to explore, and John Shepard took full advantage of it as he grew older. The other boys his age (and, once puberty kicked in and all parties involved realized that the opposite sex was actually quite interesting, the girls too) followed him with little question, for they knew that whatever he went, excitement followed, and their parents allowed it, for they knew he would not lead them astray. 

As a result, he learned several things. First, during a flash flood after a freak rainstorm that no one saw coming, he discovered that not only could he make decisions quickly in a crisis, but that they were good ones. Second, that he was fairly good at anticipating potential problems and taking steps to either avoid or mitigate them. Third, that he was very good at reading people. Fourth, as he learned at several secondary school events that his parents made him go to, he couldn't dance to save his life.

By the time he was sixteen, he was the captain of the soccer and lacrosse teams, the only reason he wasn't the head of the student council was because he didn't want to be, and it was generally acknowledged that he was probably going to be at the head of the class.

The reason why this was "probably" rather than "certainly" was a girl named Henrietta Duclos, who hailed from Quebec and was nearly as gifted as John was. Their competition, oddly enough, was rather friendly, mostly because they'd known each other for awhile and been on as friendly terms as one could expect a boy and a girl of their age to be.

That they would end up together if they decided to date at all was not a foregone conclusion, but it was close. All the boys except John were intimidated by Henrietta, whose good looks went considerably beyond just being an athletic and healthy young woman and whose brains exceeded all of theirs, and all the girls had essentially realized that if any of them did end up with John their fellows would turn on them in a heartbeat. 

As a result, they almost ended up getting together out of sheer necessity, although later neither could really remember who'd made the first overture; however, John had been the one who formally asked her out, as was the custom. However, quite honestly, each really was the only one in the school who really understood the other--well, check that, John's sister Jane (the Shepard parents were good at many things. Naming children was not one of them) understood her brother quite well, and also would have understood Henrietta, but that was irrelevant for obvious reasons--and therefore each was the only one who the other could really have a long-term relationship with.

And neither really did "casual," and they really did enjoy one another's company, and each found the other to be...quite attractive.

So, about a month after John turned fifteen (he was the younger of the two by a month and a half) they started dating. Both sets of parents were okay with it, especially since when they studied together they actually studied, although the last fifteen to thirty minutes of their study sessions were usually devoted to making out.

Shortly after John turned sixteen, however, they decided that their first time should be together. There were several reasons for this. The first was teenage hormones. The second was the fact that while they weren't sure where the relationship was going they were pretty sure it wasn't going to be a bad breakup. And the third reason was that Henrietta thought John would try and make sure that she enjoyed it. 

So, for the first and only time, the two lied to their parents about where they were going and snuck out to an unused storage shed that they'd prepared beforehand, and, stumbling and fumbling though they were, managed a rather pleasant and tender first, and then second, time for the both of them. As they fell asleep in each other's arms, cuddling for warmth, John Shepard thought nothing could possibly spoil his week.

He was proven wrong when he was woken up by the sounds of explosions and landing shuttles. 

The colony was under attack, and he needed to get to his assigned station. He moved fast, forgoing underwear in favor of getting on his shirt and pants as fast as he could, though he was momentarily distracted when he glanced in Henrietta's direction and saw that she was just sliding her shirt on. She threw him a glare, but by the time they'd gotten their boots and gunbelts on--nobody over the age of thirteen went unarmed on Mindoir--her eyes had softened a bit. 

They had different assignments in case of attack, and he caught her by the wrist. "Etta," he said, as the words "come with me" stuck in his throat, because he knew she wouldn't and shouldn't and he shouldn't even mention it, but she looked at him as though she knew, and appreciated the fact that he wanted to protect her but understood that he couldn't, not this time and then leaned in and kissed him, hard and with tongue, for a few seconds that felt like eternity and no time at all. 

"Go," she said, "I'll be all right," and he made sure that he was the first one out the door. There was no threat yet, and he gave the all clear before sprinting towards where he was supposed to be. 

Just before he reached said position, a small gun emplacement suitable for taking out shuttles, it went up in an explosion that threw him backwards into the dirt, and he barely managed to remember to tuck himself into a ball before he hit the ground. Once he'd recovered enough to stand, still spitting dirt and with a ringing in his ears, he saw that the emplacement was gone--and there was a Batarian walking towards him, restraints in hand and laughing. 

The laughter turned to panic when he drew his pistol, though that didn't last long as he put enough rounds downrange that he overheated the weapon before realizing that the Batarian didn't have a head anymore.   
That finally got him thinking clearly. His assigned position was gone, which meant he had no clue what to do now. His parents were both at their positions, but they might be dead too. 

The children's shelter. His sister would be there, along with all the others who'd gotten there in time. Maybe he could help keep them safe, or at least die trying. 

It was funny. He was more scared of failing than dying.

He ran there, hoping that he could make it in time.

He didn't. By the time he got there, it was already overrun with batarians, and the only mercy was that he saw a redheaded corpse lying on the ground next to a dead Batarian with a knife in one of its eyes. His sister'd gotten the only victory she could in that situation--she'd made them kill her instead of enslaving her.

Once he'd ducked back behind a building, he wondered where he should go next. His parents? The command post? Henrietta?

He looked in the direction of the CP, and saw a thick column of smoke coming from the building. That was out. Henrietta, then. And maybe he could find some others.

It took him nearly an hour to pick his way across the colony to where he thought Henrietta was, though it was time well-spent--he ended up killing two batarians and picking up six people--two kids who'd been captured by one of the batarians he killed, and three kids and their mother who'd been about to be discovered by the other.

When he did reach where his girlfriend had been supposed to go, however, he found that the emplacement had been destroyed, and that she had managed to go down fighting, with two batarians with pistol wounds and another with a knife rammed into his skull through his earhole.

It was in that moment that something broke inside him, and he turned to the others and said "Let's get out of here."

For twelve hours, he watched as the Batarians ransacked the colony, searching for survivors with a fine-toothed comb. Finally, they left, but he waited another twelve hours before going in alone, just in case they'd left someone behind to catch any stragglers, which meant that he was the first survivor encountered by the Alliance response force.

In the end, he was one of five hundred and sixty-eight survivors, out of a population of nearly twenty thousand. His parents, as it happened, had both died in the fighting as well.

The Alliance was caught a bit flat-footed, and really didn't have any idea what to do with the survivors. He ended up being sent to his father's sister, who lived in Edmonton, a small city in Canada, and was provided a therapist who really didn't quite seem to get why he was in such a funk.

He had tried to protect people he cared about, and he'd failed to do so. He'd not even tried to protect his parents. Yes, he'd saved some other people, and that was good, but...it wasn't as good as saving the people you were trying to save.

One day, however, he took a different way home than usual, just for a change of pace, and the route took him past an Alliance recruiting station. Looking at the posters, something clicked in his mind, and everything fell into place. The reason he'd failed was because he hadn't had the skills to do what needed to be done. Therefore, he needed to acquire those skills. And the best way to do that was to join the Alliance.

So, with that, he enrolled in the local high school, got back into soccer and lacrosse, and got himself into even better shape than he'd been before, not even noticing the massive amounts of female, and male, attention he was getting due to his single-minded purpose.

When he signed up for the Alliance the day after he turned eighteen, he blew the selection test out of the water. Despite the recruiter's pleading, however, he signed up for the infantry.

Basic training wasn't a breeze, but it wasn't as difficult for him as the other recruits, mostly because he was smart enough to avoid getting into trouble and was in excellent physical condition. 

However, he ended up becoming the lead for his class, and rediscovered the fact that he was quite good at it. He encouraged those who were down in the dumps, helped those who were struggling, rode those who were slacking, and simply did his level best to keep the drill instructors off their backs, and the others responded to that. When they left basic, his class was one of the most cohesive and improved that year, if not the most, and the instructors had noticed, and noted it in his file. It also did not escape anyone's notice that he was very physically fit, a good shot, and both extremely bright and quick-thinking.

After that, John went to advanced training, where, once again, he excelled, and was posted to one of the more difficult assignments in the Alliance military--patrolling the Skyllian Verge. It was a challenge for someone just out of training, but he rose to it.

It was about three months into the assignment that he had what he would later call "The Dream."  
He found himself standing at the bottom of the stairs in a house that he didn't recognize but for some reason felt like where he belonged, and for some reason he felt the urge to go up the stairs and down the hallway he could see there.

So he did, and when he got there he saw an open door off to the right, and, feeling the urge once more, went down the hallway and looked inside the room, and his jaw dropped.

There was a naked woman kneeling on the bed, her back to him, who looked a lot like he imagined Henrietta would have if she were still alive. Her dark hair fell down past her shoulders, and she was still lithe, but she'd grown into full womanhood, and she was even better-looking than he remembered.

Then his arousal changed to alarm as he saw that her hands were cuffed behind her and her spread legs were tied to the bedposts. What on earth...

"Jean," the woman on the bed said, and she turned her head towards him, and when he saw her face he knew that this was Henrietta--she always did say his name the French way. But what...

"Please," she said, her voice low and smoky and pleading in a way that he'd only ever heard her speak once, "this is something I want." She looked directly at him, eyes half-closed as he'd seen them more than a few times, and bit her lip. "Take me, Jean, like this. Take me and make me your good girl."

Just as she said that, however, his alarm went off, and he woke up with a raging erection. Once he dealt with that and started getting dressed, he went over what had just happened and decided that it was just one of those weird dreams that people had.

Well, until two nights later, when he had the same dream but it featured Lisa Richards, a vivacious, athletic brunette who was in one of the other squads and had flirted with John a time or two. Then, two nights later, it happened again, but this time with Henrietta again. 

This went on for nearly a month, featuring various women knew or had known, though most often Henrietta, and he was having some serious issues. What was wrong with him, that his sexual dreams exclusively involved women who were bound and at his mercy? Was he some kind of pervert?

Finally, however, he was able to take some leave, and he went to go see a therapist who specialized in sexual disorders. If there was actually something wrong with him, he needed to know now, but if there wasn't he didn't want the visit on his service record.

The therapist in question was a man in his late fifties, who bade John lie down on a couch--he had always thought that was a myth--and asked him to explain what the trouble was. 

Once John had explained the matter, the therapist asked him a long series of questions about his childhood, briefly probed into what had happened on Mindoir, and then asked about his time in the service. Once he was done, he clapped the notebook he'd been writing in shut, leaned back in the chair, threw back his head, and chuckled quietly.

"Oh dear, oh dear," he said, his English accent coming out, "from the way you were talking about it I thought this was a very serious matter."

John was confused. "Doctor, I'm having wet dreams about women who are tied up!"

"Yes, you are, and I'm sorry if I don't seem to be taking it seriously, because this sort of thing can be a problem if it's not handled properly."

He sighed. "Essentially, John, your parents raised you to use your abilities and talents to help people, to make them better and keep them safe, and you seem to be quite capable and competent, so you know that you can, and you mentioned that one of the things you enjoyed about your time in training was helping your fellow trainees improve. That this would spill over into your sex life is no surprise."

John blinked. "What?"

"Don't worry, I'll explain. Furthermore, what happened on Mindoir only increased this desire of yours." He looked at him searchingly. "You've always wondered, I think, about what might have happened if you'd gone with Henrietta, or if she'd gone with you, or if you'd gone directly to where your sister was. You've always wondered if you could've saved them. That's what pushed you to the Alliance military." Looking at John's face, the therapist shook his head. "Don't worry. I won't be reporting this visit, because my point in telling you this is that there is nothing "wrong"" he made quotation marks with his fingers, "with you. It's not normal, exactly, but you're not a pervert. In fact, there are many women who are looking for someone to make them their good girl."

John felt himself flush at the rush of arousal that went through him at the thought of doing that, but maintained his composure as he said, "I still don't get what you're saying."

"Long story short, John, you're a leader, you were raised to help people, and you know that you're good at being in charge and the one time you let people go off on their own they died, and when they went with you they lived. You've been raised not to be a dictator, so you won't take the reins unless you're given the authority to, but if someone gives them to you you will do your best to make sure they don't regret it.

"And that's what's going on here. These women, in your dreams, are giving you the reins and asking you to make them better. It's voluntary on their part. I understand that, after Mindoir and what you saw the Batarians doing, that you would want to be as far away from anything that looks like that as possible. But though my tastes don't run towards bondage and discipline, I do know enough practitioners that I can tell you that it's as far from the Batarians do as you can get."

He paused. "Does that help at all?"

John took a moment to think about it. While it certainly was something he wanted to be true, which meant he should be suspicious of it, the doctor had no reason to tell him that he was perfectly fine and didn't need his services. It still unsettled him some, but he could live with that.

"Thanks," he said as he swung his legs off the couch. "Do you have any advice?"

"Yes," the doctor replied, "I have some friends who are involved in that sort of thing, and who would be very happy to help you avoid any mistakes. However, you are somewhat young."

John nodded. He was only going to be nineteen next month, and it wasn't hard to think of ways that this sort of thing could go very badly wrong. Some guidance would be helpful. 

"Come back and see me in, say, a year and a month, and I'll get you in touch with them. In the meantime, here's a quick reading list. All quite respectable, no trashy nonsense. Best practices, that sort of thing."

John walked out of the office with a spring in his step, whistling as he went.

Remarkably enough, the dreams went away after that, though not immediately, and reading through the list of books that the doctor had provided helped that process along as he just sort of accepted it and decided that he was going to treat this like every other part of his life.

Of course, his promotion to corporal helped a little, because he was leading a fire team now, and that took a lot of time and attention. Fortunately, they were all pretty squared away, and after a couple of minor actions John developed a deserved reputation as a man who knew his way around a battlefield and could get the best out of those under his command.

At any rate, a year and a month went by, and he managed to get two weeks of leave for right after his twentieth birthday, and he sent a message to Dr. Richards, who then gave him an address and a name--the fairly innocuous-sounding Shellback Club.


	3. For the Longest Time: John II

In a wildly bizarre moment, he wondered how they warded off turtle enthusiasts as he knocked on the door, wondering who and what he'd find inside.

The person who opened the door was not what he had been expecting, though if he'd been asked what he was expecting he really couldn't have told you (though it would have likely involved a black leather bustier and high leather boots). She was a pleasant-looking woman in her fifties who was letting the gray show in her brown hair, and it lent her the sort of authority given to an elder. However, she also had a broad smile on her face.

"Ah, John Shepard, we've been expecting you, come in, come in," she said, closing the door behind them as she stepped in. "Oh, you're not late or anything, Dr. Richards just told us you were coming by today and we did so hope that you'd get here with enough time to have a full discussion before the club opened tonight."

John blinked. "A full discussion. You mean of my...ah...proclivities?"

She laughed then. "Ah, a shy top I see. Don't worry, your kind usually makes good ones, you always think of the responsibility first and that's what matters, why I remember my Albert..."

"Marigold," a male voice said from behind him, and John turned and stepped back to see a man, also with graying hair, step through a doorway as he chuckled, "give the boy some time to adjust before you overwhelm him. And, before you ask," he added as he turned to John, "Dr. Richards did tell us a little about you, but not much. Just a name and a description."

He looked at John searchingly. "How long have you served?" he asked.

"Two years, sir," John replied. "I made corporal six months ago."

Albert nodded. "A good sign. But, first, proper introductions. I am Albert Dodson, and this is my wife, Marigold. We switch roles."

John nodded at that. He could understand the appeal of it, sort of, but it wasn't a tendency he shared. 

"Dr. Richards said you could use some guidance, and we'd be happy to provide it. I was in the service myself, a long time ago. And I like teaching."

John motioned to a chair. "Do you mind we sit down?"

"Oh, of course not, I was just about to suggest it myself. This could take awhile." 

Once they were seated, he cut to the heart of the matter. "How long is your leave?"

"Two weeks," John replied, "but really I have nine days left after this one."

"Hmmph. A compressed course, then. Usually the introduction is a three-month course, one session per week, but if you did what Dr. Richards told you we should be able to skip a few sessions--the first half of the intro course is mostly theory."

"Really?" 

"Of course. Theory, jargon, a little bit of visual aid just to get people used to the idea--nothing live, of course. The intro course is the only one required for membership in the Shellback, because based on my experiences elsewhere I've found that a lot of problems are avoided with a proper understanding of what this whole thing is about. So tell me, Mr. Shepard. What do you think this is about?"

"Making sure everyone involved gets what they want while pretending that it's about what the top wants."

Albert smiled. "Exactly. And that everyone includes the top or dom by the way. I've seen burnout cases, and it's never good. Wrecks the dom, wrecks the sub, too, if they're a decent person, and there's few things worse than when a top has to safeword."

John's eyebrows furrowed. "How does that happen?" he asked in puzzlement.

The older man leaned forward. "Sometimes, the sub will say something or otherwise respond in such a way that it causes the dom to freak out. It's just very rare, because usually they go over what's going to freak them out. But sometimes, especially if they're just getting started and don't think past 'make sure the sub's boundaries are respected,' things happen. For example, suppose you were doing a scene, and your submissive started begging you not to hurt her while calling you master. How would you respond?"

John felt his face shut down. "Not well. I was raised on Mindoir, and I've seen Batarian slave camps. Had to do recon on some of them. Not the of thing you can easily forget." He didn't go further. These good people didn't need to hear the details. "But that would definitely throw me out. Hard."

He didn't like admitting to weakness, never had, but something told him that honesty here was not only necessary, but respected.

Albert nodded. "I suspected as such. But, just to see what we can skip, let me ask you a few questions..."  
John had not been expecting a quiz, but he had read the books Richards had recommended, and had read some of the ones they cited. He didn't consider himself any kind of authority on the subject, but he thought he had a good grasp of the basics: discussion of boundaries, aftercare, figuring what exactly you and your partner or partners wanted, etc. 

After about a hour of questions, the last of which was a particularly thorny problem involving an abuse victim who thought she was a sub (John would have advised that she seek a therapist, if she had not already, in order to sort out her own head and figure out whether or not it her submitting to someone would help or hurt), Albert leaned back in his chair. 

"Excellent. You did your homework, young man, and a bit more besides. I think we may be able to skip to the scenario-based parts of the course, and skip the lectures entirely."

"Scenario-based?"

"Yes. Nothing really sexual, of course, simply dealing with the paperwork portions--you know, setting boundaries and such--and what you do after the sex." He paused. "Which reminds me, we need to figure out your boundaries before we proceed further. Don't want you to go catatonic in the middle of class. Had that happen before, and it's mortifying. Did you come with a list?"

"No. Didn't think I'd need one."

Albert shrugged. "That would have made things easier, but we happen to keep such lists here. It's not comprehensive, but it covers just about everything you'll actually run into."

He turned to get up, but Marigold was already beside him, papers and pen in hand. "Don't take too long, now," she admonished him. "Remember, we're open tonight. I'll be downstairs."

"I won't forget, dear," he replied, and handed the papers to John. "Take your time, really. I mostly handle the numbers side of things, she handles the people. Stereotypical, I know, but it works for us."

John shrugged. It didn't matter to him how they handled things. He started reading the list, and a slight smile broke his face when he saw that the boxes next to each item were labeled "Oh very much yes," "sounds good," "we can try that," "no thanks," and "OH HELL NO!"

It took him about twenty minutes to get through all five pages, after which he handed them over to Albert, who read over them quickly. He didn't make much comment while he read, other than to murmur "interesting" a couple of times. When he was done, however, he looked over at John.

"No real surprises here, given what you told me, but I do find it interesting that you'd rather not deal with a brat."

John shrugged. "That's an extra source of stress that I don't need. Like you said, I want to help people be better, but they have to want to be better themselves. Making them be better--I don't know, it just doesn't sit well. And I don't like punishing people. I like helping people discipline themselves."

Albert took a moment and shook his head. "Those poor, unsuspecting women," he said to himself, then looked back at him. "It's getting late, I'm afraid."

He paused. "Did you have any plans for the evening?"

John shook his head. "Other than getting a bite to eat and going to bed, no."

"Ah. Well, in that case, I would like to make you an offer."

"Oh?"

"The course isn't free, but it's not that expensive either. Something came up for one of our usual bouncers that makes him unavailable for the next few nights. If you could fill in, I'd call it square."

John thought about that for a minute. "I like the idea," he said slowly, "but I might let something slide that I shouldn't, or come down hard on something innocuous."

Albert waved a hand. "You'd be working the door, mostly, and I think you'll be able to sniff out trouble pretty well."

John wasn't sure of that, but he decided to trust Albert's judgment.

"I'm in. What time tonight?"

"Come back in an hour."

As it happened, John was very good at reading people, as he demonstrated that night and the following nights. He didn't do a better job than the usual guy, but he did almost as well--he had a knack for noticing furtiveness and the kind of look that said someone was already out of it and did not need to be let in (the Shellback had a very strict "No intoxicants" policy that John thoroughly agreed with) and while he turned away a few people who could've been let in without a problem no one got in who shouldn't have.

This went on for the next several days--scenarios in the afternoon, work in the night, sleep in the morning--and John had no idea of the reputation he was getting. 

Said reputation came in three parts.

First, he was quite physically attractive. Approximately three-quarters of the people who came to the door and were attracted to men immediately considered whether or not they might be able to inveigle him into their bed, or themselves into his. 

Second, the way he handled himself and others. He was able, generally, to handle people who needed to be kept out of the Shellback with a word and a look, but the few times it required some kind of physical force he handled it quickly, decisively, and in such a way that nothing was really hurt except someone else's pride--and it was very obvious to everyone watching who knew anything about fighting that, if he'd wanted to, he could have hurt the person very badly. However, he was also a friendly sort, with an easy smile and a good word for anyone. 

Third, the employees of the Shellback who acted as the other party in the various scenarios that Albert ran him through (who were subs--had John been a sub, the actors would have been doms, in order to keep things as close to how they would be in real life as possible) all came away from them thinking that if he was even close to as good in real life as he was in those scenarios that they would very much like him to be their dom, oh yes indeed. And they weren't shy about talking about it, either, at least with the regular customers who could be trusted to be discreet and not go after the lad immediately.

This reputation served him in good stead, for the regular bouncer returned two days before he was to leave, and Albert told him that he had passed the course with flying colors, and was free to come to the Shellback as a customer--though, if he were willing to moonlight as a bouncer on occasion, he would be paid however he wanted, whether in money or in tutoring, the Shellback offering classes in everything from proper knot-tying and binding to the creative uses of mass effect fields. 

As a result, when he stepped through the door that Friday night and headed for the bar, carefully making sure not to run into anyone, he found it rather more difficult to avoid doing so than someone else might have.

Once he reached the bar and got himself a drink, he realized that he was of two minds about what he wanted. On the one hand, he was, to put it bluntly, quite horny. It had, after all, been four years, and current circumstances, particularly the fact that there were numerous nubile young women about making it evident that they were down for whatever, left him in a mildly uncomfortable state of near-arousal. On the other hand, he didn't do casual. It just didn't seem quite right, especially with something as involved as this.

As his eyes swept the room, he noticed that they kept coming back to a table with four girls sitting at it. Then he noticed that they went to one girl in particular, who looked like she wanted to be here but hadn't quite understood the proper attire. In fact, she was wearing a t-shirt, and, he suspected, jeans. Her friends got up to get on the dance floor, she stayed behind, and he decided to give it a shot and see what happened.

What happened was that the girl he was approaching, whose name was Maddie Taylor, was actually sort of there because of him. She was a member of the Shellback, though not really a regular, but when her friends had mentioned that there was a hot guy who seemed like a really good guy, was a top, and wasn't seeing anyone, she decided to come with them. Even though she wasn't a fan of casual, as it happened, she also wasn't really looking for lifelong at this point either--a girl starting on her career had to be flexible.  
At any rate, when she saw a guy who perfectly matched the description her friends had given head her way, her mouth immediately went dry, her heart started pounding, and, as he got closer and she was able to see him more clearly, her panties started getting damp.

What she didn't know was that, as he was getting a better look at her, he was dealing with similar issues, though in his case he was cursing his developing erection as he noticed the fact that she was reasonably trim, had a look about her that said she knew what she wanted out of life, and had a rather nice figure.

As it turned out, neither of them should have been worried. Within fifteen minutes, they were talking to each other like they were old friends, within an hour they were in a corner booth (after she let her friends know what was going on, which precaution John approved of), and by the time the club shut down they had each other's numbers and an agreement to meet the next night. 

By the end of the next night, he'd explained what he did for a living to her and why it would mean he wouldn't be back for a few weeks, and she nodded and told him to call next time he'd be in town--and that she would very much like it, if he did, which she emphasized by giving him a tonsil-hockey kiss and a full-body embrace that could only be likened to that of a python. Which John did his best to return. 

The next few weeks were spent messaging each other back and forth about how exactly they planned to have it go down when next they met. In the end, given that it was their first time together (though he made her aware that she was his first sub and she made him aware that he was not her first top--as it turned out, she was two years older than he was) they decided to go with a fairly basic "tie all four limbs to the bed" approach, no gag or blindfold, minimal verbal commands, plenty of edging and consequent begging and pleading, along with some preliminary teasing on Maddie's part--a "help the naughty girl become a good girl" sort of thing.

Also, for safety's sake, they confirmed that neither had some form of STD, an issue that had never been quite eradicated and had actually returned with humanity's contact with other species, and Maddie had casually dropped that she had birth control implants and that her safe word was "echidna." They also spent that time getting to know each other a little better, and were quite satisfied that, as long as this night wasn't a total disaster, that this relationship might not be forever, but it was hardly going to be only nine and a half weeks.

As it happened, that night was a smashing success. Maddie spent the entirety of dinner keying John up with not-so-subtle glances, innuendos, and stretching that did very interesting things to her clothes, and John did the same to her by glares that indicated that she was going to pay for what she was doing once he had her at his mercy.

When they finally got back to her place, a small one-bedroom apartment that was all she could afford, even with the low prices common to a colony world, he had her backed up against the wall, hands pinned behind her back, within approximately three seconds.

"Naughty girl," he whispered into her ear, "getting me hard while we were at dinner and I couldn't do anything about it. What were you hoping for? That I'd forget myself and just take you when we got back here?"

Truth be told, Maddie actually wouldn't have minded if John had simply bent her over the couch, pulled down her pants (she was going commando tonight, something she intended to let him find out for himself) and gone to town, but she knew what she wanted more than just that, and so her reply was "No, sir," as she bit her lip and looked up at him through half-lidded eyes.

"Odd way of showing it," he said with a growl that, he noted, made her already-swollen pupils dilate a little more, and stepped back from her. "Now get your clothes off and get yourself to your bed."

He deliberately kept his eyes on her to see what she would do, and she did not disappoint. After taking off her shoes and socks, thereby getting the awkward bits out of the way (there is no sexy way to take off socks), she then went for her pants, quickly unbuttoning them and showing John exactly what she wasn't wearing, then turning around and slowly shimmying them off her buttocks and down her legs. John was utterly entranced by the sight as he watched her body sway from side to side like a sapling in the breeze and her long, shapely legs finally step out and reveal themselves in full glory, a process she repeated with her blouse, which also revealed exactly what she wasn't wearing under it and breasts that fit perfectly with her frame and were already evidently stiff and hard.

She then walked slowly to her open bedroom door, deliberately putting some sway in her hips as she did so. John, in the meantime, took the opportunity to rid himself of his shoes and socks, then proceeded to follow her to where she was adjusting herself on the bed--kneeling, facing the door, hands behind her back, breasts poking out and legs slightly spread to reveal her evident arousal. 

John shook his head. "Oh no you don't. Arms and legs to each bedpost, naughty girl."

She obeyed with alacrity, and he had to look away from the bed for a moment, lest he forget himself at the sight of her splayed open and exposed.

He restrained himself, however, and quickly took hold of the ropes and bound her to where, while she had some freedom of movement, she could neither bring her legs together nor get out on her own. That done, with her naked, bound, and helpless to do anything, he proceeded to take off his clothes, shirt first, then the rest, making sure to take his time about it.

For Maddie's part, as he tantalizingly exposed his powerful body to her, she was about ready to start begging and pleading now, because the heat coiling in her loins was nearly unbearable, and there was only one way to relieve it, but when she looked at John she had to restrain the urge to gulp. It was very obvious that said relief was not going to come any time soon, but she was looking forward to it anyway.

Then, when she saw his manhood, which fit his frame perfectly, she knew there would be no disappointments this night.

There weren't, as John employed fingers and tongue and breath to bring her to the edge of orgasm three times as she breathed out "yes" and "please" and "Don't stop," as her back arched and she strained against the ropes that bound her, only to cruelly disappoint her each time. It was after the third time that he heard their agreed-upon signal for when she didn't think she could take another denial--"Please, sir, I'll be a good girl, just please let me come."

"Oh no," he said sternly as he rose from between her legs. "Not just yet," he continued as he moved forward, making sure to avoid resting any of his weight on any parts of her. "Naughty girls don't get to come, good girls do, and good girls make absolutely sure their lover's ready to take them without any fuss, and while you're ready" (indeed, John's lower face was a bit slick by this point) "I'm not quite where I want to be."

He smiled then, as he set his feet in place and moved himself so that he was squatting over her, hands gripping the headboard, privates dangling where she could reach them with her mouth without having to strain and his body completely filled her field of vision. Her face provided evidence that this was turning her on and revving her up, as her irises had nearly vanished. 

"Now, get me rock hard like a good girl, and I'll see about getting you your satisfaction."

When the wet heat of her mouth and tongue wrapped around his length down to his testicles John was extremely grateful that he'd thought to grab the headboard, because otherwise he might have fallen over. It was taking all of his self-control to not just come in her mouth, which wouldn't be disastrous, since she was okay with that sort of thing, but would still be a little embarrassing.

Even so, her tongue was nearly prehensile, and it didn't take long for him to decide that he wasn't going to get any harder. "Stop," he ordered, and she did, and he carefully moved his hands to the spaces between her arms and head and, one leg at a time, moved his feet to where they were between her legs.

That done, he kissed her gently, and she savored the mixed tastes of herself and him as he said, "Good girl. Very good girl, taking and serving me so well. You can come whenever you like," he added as he reached back with one hand and adjusted himself so that he was aimed properly, then drove in with one quick, decisive thrust, aided by the lubrication that thirty minutes of arousal had provided. 

The resultant "Yes sir, yes John, yes yes yes oh yes" repeated for a minute or so, along with the way she clenched him, was enough to send John over the edge too, and as his seed left him he felt the urge to howl in triumph, but resisted it successfully. 

Once he was done, he carefully disengaged and slid in next to her. "How was that?" he asked quietly, idly teasing one of her breasts.

She shivered a little at the contact, already feeling her arousal return. "Wonderful," she said dreamily, "just like I hoped it would be."

"Good," he replied, and she had to suppress a whimper as his smile got very wide, because though with that answer she'd given him the signal to do this it was going to be absolute agony before she got the ecstasy, "because I want to make sure you're going to stay a good girl, so we," he said as he slipped down her body and back between her legs, "are going to do this again."

And so they did, though John sped up the process slightly now that he knew where to caress, rub, push, and occasionally pinch to get her to where he wanted her to be, and it didn't take as long for the same end result to occur. 

That done (they'd agreed to a maximum of two rounds, and through her orgasm-induced mental haze Maddie had the thought that she would never doubt John Shepard's stamina) John gently untied his lover, carefully caressing her wrists and ankles and whispering "Good girl, very good girl" to her, then hauling her to the shower to get the dried sweat and sexual fluids off her before carrying her back to the bed, where he took off the very absorbent top sheet that they'd put in place beforehand and laid her down in it, then wrapped himself around her and kissed her ear, saying quietly, "sleep well."

As he drifted off, the images of her coming apart under him over and over again filled his mind, and he smiled. Apparently he was good at this too.

The next morning, when they both woke up happy and sated and hungry, they agreed over breakfast that they should do this sort of thing again, though not exactly the same thing, possibly again tonight, but that today they should explore the city a little and just...talk.

And thus they did for nearly a year, the sort of companionship where both parties were fairly certain that it wouldn't last but wouldn't mind if it did, and their scenes became steadily more intricate as John learned Maddie's body and mind and she learned his, and he occasionally moonlighted as a bouncer at the Shellback and took some of the more advanced training courses in payment, especially ropework. 

Finally, however, the inevitable happened. John got a promotion to sergeant and a notification of change of base where he would still be doing what he'd been doing. Though there was a little bit of mutual sniffling when he broke the news to her there were no recriminations of any kind (and, on his next-to-last free night before he left, they had a two-hour session that left them so exhausted and warm and fuzzy that they slept until noon the next day). Also, the crew at the Shellback threw him a small farewell party, and when he left, he did so with a recommendation for place named the Earthy Library, whose owners, Terizon and Marissa Carr, were good friends with Albert and Marigold, and a letter of recommendation for him written by them.

As he walked out of the Shellback for what would be the last time, he wondered how long it would be before he got the chance to go planetside on Elysium.

**A/N: I should clarify here that none of the thought processes among the viewpoint characters of this story should necessarily be taken as "this is how you should think about these things." While these characters are meant to be good, they do still have character development to undergo.**


	4. For the Longest Time: John III

The first month he spent stationed over Elysium he didn't get even consider going to the place he'd been recommended. Not only was it quite busy--they had two missions into the systems bordering the Skyllian Verge in as many weeks--but he also needed to establish some level of rapport with his new comrades, which required a pub crawl or two. 

That done, however, he was able to withdraw a little, and on his next liberty he went to the Earthy Library a few hours before it opened to make his introductions. The owners, of course, had been anticipating his arrival, Marigold having made sure to send them a message, and so when he arrived there was a minimum of fuss. 

They did their due diligence, of course, sizing him up and satisfying themselves that their friends were not mistaken and that John Shepard was actually a functional human being and not a sexual predator (though Terizon, who was a former soldier himself, could tell that on the battlefield John would not be denied what he wanted). At the end of the interview, they agreed that he would be most welcome there, and that discretion was observed at the Library.

He did not, of course, immediately participate the first night he went, but merely observed, getting the lay of the land and the customs of the country. This place was a little more open than the Shellback, with less regular or club clothing and more fetish gear, but that wasn't really a problem for him. He did notice the number of admiring glances he drew, though, and after a few conversations concluded that this would be a good place to be.

It was on his second shore leave that it happened. He'd just gotten off the transport tube closest to the Earthy Library when the sirens began to wail, and a brief chill went through him when he realized that it was the signal that an attack was incoming--obviously a very unexpected one, since he looked up and saw the tell-tale fires of ships and shuttles crashing through the atmosphere as the planetary defense batteries opened fire. 

For a moment, he was uncertain of what to do. He was armed, of course--once he had reached legal age to own a gun on his own, he never went anywhere without one, and Terizon and Karla, unlike many in the community (one of the reasons Albert and Marigold had recommended he go to them), were also gun enthusiasts. However, he wasn't sure whether he should try and get back to his ship, or find out what he could do here on the ground. Then he remembered that not only were all the shuttles grounded, but the primary defense coordinating center was located right here. And if the attackers' intel was good enough that they'd been able to skip into the system undetected, then this was almost certainly their primary target.

It needed to be held at all costs. As long as the planetary defense grid was coordinated, no one would be lifting off from Elysium after they landed, and no slaves would be taken.

"Not this time, you bastards," John Shepard snarled to himself as he checked his pistol, an Elkoss Combine piece, and started trotting towards the center. 

Once he got there, he realized two things. First, there was no one in charge. Second, there were a lot of willing people around. So, looking around and finding no one who looked like his superior, he spoke up. 

"Where's the militia commander?" He asked.

"She's dead, and so's most of the staff. We got the bastards who killed 'em, barely, but everyone's a bit shook," a weatherbeaten older man replied, then squinted at him. "Who're you?"

"Sergeant John Shepard, Alliance Marines," John replied, mind whirling furiously as he spoke. "Who's the senior person alive for the command center staff, the ones who make sure everything's running right?"

"That'd be me."

"Your people inside?"

"All of 'em."

"Get back in there yourself. I'll handle things out here and keep them out."

The old man nodded. "Got it. Shields should be coming up...now," he finished, as they flashed into existence. "Won't stop them comin' in on foot, but it will keep them from landin' right on top of us. Good luck, sergeant." 

With that, he turned and went into the command center, and the door sealed shut behind him.

John then turned to the mass of people milling about and called out "Quiet!" At the top of his lungs.

For a moment, the only noise hat could be heard was the hum of the shields and the sound of explosions before he said, in a voice that carried without being demanding, "Where are your sergeants?"

Several men and women came forward, one asking, "Who're you?"

"Sergeant John Shepard, Alliance Marines," he replied, and there was some murmuring at that.

"Who here's a veteran?" He asked, hoping that there was more than one. 

Four raised their hands. 

"Any surviving officers?" He asked.

One of the men spat. "None here," he replied. "All the good 'uns got killed by infiltrators, and the rest're under their beds somewhere I guess."

Wonderful. John's mind sped ahead. "How many approaches here?"

"Two," the same man said. "There's this road here and then a service road out back. That one's wider, and easier to get up." 

If the pirates' intel was as good as it seemed to be, they'd know that.

John looked at him. "Take a fifth of the people here and dig in where you can hold the road. You and you," he said, pointing at the two steadier noncoms, "each take an eighth and spread out along the perimeter. I don't want them sneaking in.

"You and me," he said to the last one, who looked a little nervous, "are going to hold the back entrance with most of the rest." It was a bit of a gamble, but he could only be in one place at once, and he needed steady hands elsewhere, much as he hated the notion, and the service entrance was going to be where they threw their main attack, so That was where he was going to be, and it was best to directly oversee your weakest link.

They needed no further prompting--as the man who'd spoken up first, a twenty-year veteran of the Alliance Marines who'd retired as a sergeant-major said later--"He sounded like an officer, and he looked like one to boot"--and within five minutes the chaos approached something like order as the veterans took things in hand and quickly made sure that all the forces had about equal firepower, though the perimeter watches were a little heavy on pistols and light on everything else.

Within ten minutes, they'd deployed out and started to get dug in, and a good thing, too, because the first probes came up the roads then. They weren't much, and were seen off very quickly, leaving wrecked vehicles and corpses behind, and while some of the militia cheered, John and those among them who'd been in the military didn't. They knew what was coming.

As they waited, he took tally of his forces. He had about two hundred militia, indifferently armed and trained but with a decent core of veterans. Forty watching the main gate, fifty watching the perimeter, eighty here at the service gate, and twenty in reserve. He wished that both gates had turrets guarding them, but for some reason only the main gate did, another reason that he thought he'd deployed well.

Also, the command center would be an obstacle to deploying the reserves, but hopefully it wouldn't be too much of one.

Hopefully, he thought to himself, then took another look at the town and winced. Burning buildings were inevitable in an urban battle, and there were obviously some pockets of resistance, but even in the Marines there were pyromaniacs who burned for the fun of it, and in a crew like the one attacking there'd be more of them and much less discipline to keep them in line. Half the town would be gone soon enough, and he clenched his fist.

"None of you are getting away," he whispered. "I promise you that."

A couple of militiamen looked behind them, thinking they'd heard something, and then immediately turned around, ready to face whatever came their way. Because nothing could be more terrifying than their commander's face at this moment.

A good thing they did, too, because right then the first elements of the assault came in. These were as reckless as the first probes, just in greater numbers, and they made short work of them. For a moment, John felt a spark of hope. If the pirates just kept throwing people at him as they arrived, he was sure he could hold on until the the Navy got here.

However, it soon became obvious that that wasn't going to happen. Below them, the pirates gathered together, a force that obviously outnumbered theirs by at least two to one, perhaps more. If John had had a platoon of Marines with him he wouldn't have been worried at all. These militia, on the other hand, he didn't trust not to run.

Well, time to explain why that was a bad idea.

"Listen up!" He said in a carrying voice as he pointed to the gathering attack force. "Those bastards down there are going to be coming up in a few minutes. And your families are behind you. And you're going to be tempted to run, to go back and try and protect them close in. 

"And that is going to doom them all. I was on Mindoir, when the batarians raided it. They killed everyone they found with a weapon, and they took the rest as slaves. Even before they had them loaded, they were raping and beating their prisoners. And we know good and well what happened to them afterwards."

Everyone looked grim at that. Modern technology had allowed for methods of control and punishment that the slavers and overseers of humanity's past couldn't even have imagined in their most sadistic dreams.

"As long this place holds, they can't lift off. As long as they can't lift off, they can't leave with what prisoners they've taken. As long as this place holds, your families and friends will not have to face that."

His voice went harsh. "But if you break and run, if you don't hold, they will face that. And you will know that you failed them, in their hour of need. But if you hold, if you fight until either you die or they run, then you will know that you did your job, that you did not fail them. And we have all the advantages. The Alliance fleet is on its way," hopefully, he thought to himself, "we have the high ground, and we have something worth fighting for. All they have to fight for is a bit of loot and their own miserable lives, neither of which they're willing to die for.

"All of that means that you're going to hold. Do you understand?"

There was no cheering. The situation was far too grim for that. But there was acceptance of what he'd said, as he could see the knowledge of the truth settle into the bones of the militia as they settled in and checked their weapons.

He checked his pistol one last time. He suspected that he'd be trading it in for something else soon enough.

His omni-tool buzzed with the tone for an incoming call.

He took it.

"Sergeant Shepard, Lieutenant Croft."

"Yes sir," he replied automatically, focusing on the oncoming pirate assault. It wouldn't be long.

"What's your location?"

He remembered the official name for the place. "Halberstam station, sir."

"Good. Listen, you have to hold the place. It's a furball up here and we're not going to be able to send in any reinforcements or provide fire support until we get this pirate fleet sorted out. Word is that the fleet is on its way, but they're at least two hours away."

John nodded. He'd thought it might be like that.

"Understood, sir. If they do take this station, I'll be dead."

"You're a good man, Sergeant. Lieutenant Croft out."

And...here they came.

* * *

John was never quite able to remember the exact details of what happened during the next four hours as he led the defense of Halberstam station, although he was able to keep everything chronologically in order.

Mostly what he remembered was a series of moments, largely disconnected from each other.

Grabbing an assault rifle when it's original owner took a burst straight to the head, then taking out his killer and his two friends with one burst, and then yelling at the man who'd been next to the dead woman to stand his ground, damn it...

Taking out a particularly capable-looking turian from seventy-five yards away as he directed two squads of pirates in a well-organized leapfrog advance, then barely throwing himself out of the way in time when two high-explosive sniper rounds came in, creating just enough distance that all the explosions did was temporarily short his shields and force him to spit some dirt out of his mouth...

Yelling at the militia to hold in place the first time the pirates broke and ran, because he could see that they already had reinforcements coming in and any kind of counterattack was going to end up as dogfood...

The feeling of exultation as the second attack recoiled back down the road before it got into shotgun range as it ran into a hail of assault rifle fire thanks to the scavenging he'd ordered the militia to do in lieu of something incredibly stupid...

The sense of relief when the sniper's duel finally ended in the defenders' favor...

The third attack, led by a pair of M-29 Grizzlies that almost breached the gate, and probably would have if he hadn't dropped the bundle of grenades just so underneath one of them and sent it straight to hell...

The sheer anger at the fact that all he could do was stand his ground and take it, being unable to go and finish the enemy off, that all he could do was react to his opponents' moves, uncoordinated and flailing as they were...

The fourth attack, which came within an ace of coming over one side of the perimeter when it sent a company's worth of pirates up in stolen aircars, and probably would have if he hadn't still had his reserve available, waiting for them to pull something like that. Not a single one had survived to land...

His memories of that day became coherent again with the combination of happiness and despair as he got the word that every single surviving pirate on the planet was coming straight for here, abandoning most of their loot and all of their captives, because the Navy had just shown up and they knew that if they didn't take this station down none of them were leaving the planet alive.

He looked out past his position, then looked at the defenses. Outside was a nightmare. The smell was that of a truly disturbing combination of various kinds of burnt meat, flammable liquids, plastics, and other things. The ground was strewn with corpses, not to the point where you couldn't see it, but there were dozens of bodies out there, perhaps hundreds. The vehicles the pirates had used were out there too, burning still. 

His position wasn't much better, though. The vehicles and boxes that they'd used to make the barricade were tumbled about, and while it was still a usable defensive position little of it remained intact. Only a little more than half of his force was still able to fight, and that only if you counted "can lie prone, aim, and pull the trigger while being unable to do anything else" as "ready to fight." The rest were dead or wounded, the latter having been taken inside the station as time permitted. He knew some had bled out during the intervals, but medi-gel was one of the things that was in short supply, and triage had been a must. 

That had not been an easy order to give.

At least there would be no slaves taken, this time. It would not be another Mindoir. No matter what happened next, it would not be another Mindoir. 

"Are there any reinforcements coming in?" He asked quietly. That could mean the difference between survival and defeat. Probably would. 

"None that will get there before the pirates do. What's left of the rest of the Elysian militia isn't showing any signs of pursuit. You'll have to keep them off for at least half-an-hour on your own."

John cursed. "How many?"

"There's somewhere between three or four hundred coming in. We're not sure, we're just guessing based on radar and visual imagery and the size of the vehicles coming in."

John looked out at the ground in front of him. There were probably at least two hundred or so pirates surrounding the station, maybe more. If the pirates made any kind of determined assault, and, with the Navy coming in, they'd fight like cornered rats, they'd be up and over his defenses well before anyone else showed up.

Falling back inside the station wasn't really an option, either. There was just wasn't enough room in there, especially with all the civilians crammed inside. Trying to defend from in there would have the same results as defending out here. 

They couldn't run. They couldn't hold. But the thing about the courage of desperation was that it was brittle. If he could convince the attackers that they couldn't take the station and escape, after losing probably at least half the attack force already, a casualty rate that would have crippling effects on an elite force, much less a rag-tag bunch of slapped-together pirates, slavers, and marcs, they'd break and run. 

He was going to have to bluff. The question was how.

As he saw the assorted shuttles, air cars, and other vehicles come in, he watched to see where they landed, and his jaw dropped as they all came down to the assembly area where the pirates had gathered before attacking up the service road.

It made a certain amount of sense. If anyone was in charge over there, after the plan had so thoroughly and obviously gone to hell, it wasn't unreasonable to think that the only way they'd be able to get their pack of criminals to do what needed to be done for any of them to make it off this planet was to give them the feeling of solidarity you got from a packed mass.

Still, he'd have taken his chances and gone for a full perimeter assault. 

And that was when he knew what his bluff was going to be.

It was a dice roll the likes of which he never would have even considered in other circumstances, but it was necessary. 

He pointed to three soldiers. "Each of you go to one of the sergeants. Tell them to bring anyone who can walk over here, quickly. Move!"

He watched the pirates' assembly area carefully as he waited for everyone to get to him. He didn't know how long it would take them to put it all together, but he knew there wasn't time to waste.

After what seemed like half an hour but was actually perhaps five minutes, the militia from the other sides of the perimeter gathered around, and he called the defenders from his side over to him. And...the pirates were starting to move. Nuts.

"Listen up," he yelled. "The Navy's here, and the pirates know it, and they know their only chance is to take this place so they can get off this planet. Every single one of them is coming here, and if they get inside everyone in there is dead."

Everyone was looking at him now.

"Listen. They've failed. They know they've failed. They're going to be ready to crack."

I hope, he thought. Once brittle morale was shattered was nearly impossible to put back together again in any sort of timely fashion, but before that it could be extremely strong, especially in a desperate time like this.

On the other hand, it was pretty obvious that this attack had enlisted pirates from all over the Terminus Systems. They weren't used to working together, didn't know each other except by reputation, and almost certainly didn't trust each other to not break and run when things went south.

He looked out at the pirates one more time and understood exactly what they were doing. Whoever was in charge over there was obviously going for the straightforward packed mass frontal assault, probably figuring that the reassuring feeling of having others all around them would compensate for the pirates' morale issues.

Unfortunately for them, that also meant they were a massive target, and that he only had to defeat one attack, rather than try and fend off multiple ones. The enemy commander had to be rattled in order to throw away an opportunity in order to actually use one of his biggest advantages, and John gave a well-nigh fey laugh.

"But if we do like we've been doing," he continued, "they're going to beat us down with their superior numbers and swarm over us."

He looked at the attack column. No vehicles, as he'd suspected. 

"So that's not what we're going to do. We're going to hunker down behind that barricade." He pointed to what was left of the defenses. "We're going to let them get in close. Real close. Closer than any of us is going to be comfortable with. They're going to think we ran or went into a panic." He bared his teeth. "And they're going to be dead wrong.

"On my signal, we're going to come out of our hiding places and cut loose. I want you firing 'til your weapons overheat, and have a spare ready to hand. If you have a shotgun, overcharge it and try to aim for the center. If you have any grenades, do the same. Then we attack."

"Attack, Sergeant?" one of the militia sergeants asked incredulously. Not one of the veterans, though. They were on board with this.

"Yes, attack. They'll be stunned--probably lose at least a tenth of their force in five seconds. Then they're going to be faced by all of you, charging at them and screaming like maniacs who they didn't think we're even there ten seconds before, and this after very obviously being on the losing end. They'll crack like an egg." He looked around. "Any questions?"

There weren't any.

"Let's go then. The signal is me yelling "Up and at 'em" and opening fire. Understood?"

"Yes sir!"

The setup didn't take long, and John had long minutes to wait before the pirates came in range.

Remarkably enough, he didn't feel nervous at all. He'd done the best he knew how, and no matter whatever else happened today, his ghosts would be laid to rest. For a moment, he almost thought he felt four...presences...near him, offering quiet assurance, but then they were gone, and when he poked his head around he saw that the pirates were perfectly in the zone he wanted.

"Up and at 'em!" he howled, armor speakers set to maximum, and whirled around the corner and fired, dropping the three pirates who appeared in front of him with one long burst that overheated his rifle and was drowned out by the cacophony of war as the survivors of the militia followed his example and he saw pirates fly into the air as explosions ripped through the heart of the column.

He dropped his assault rifle and grabbed the other one he'd slung over his back, yelled "Follow me!" And charged into the still stunned and confused column, firing short bursts into anything still on its feet. He couldn't look back, he couldn't afford to show uncertainty of any kind, but he could hear war cries and gunfire coming from his sides, and he saw the surviving pirates start to step back and lower their guns as he charged forward, killing one with every burst, and there were some more explosions and that did it, they were running, running like Hell itself was coming for them, and he yelled, once more, "Follow me!" before something slammed into him and the world went dark.


	5. For the Longest Time: John IV

When he woke up in the hospital bed three days later, in the middle of the night with no one there, mouth dry as cotton and obviously stuck with a catheter, he had a brief moment of disorientation before remembering how he'd gotten there. Obviously he'd survived and hadn't been taken prisoner, but that still didn't answer the question of what exactly had happened after he went down. And that was something he very much needed to know, whether the people he'd been supposed to protect and the people he'd led into battle were still alive.

When he hit the button for the nurse, it was with a distinct roiling feeling in his stomach and an accelerated heartbeat, and he was extremely glad when the person who came in with the nurse was one of the other sergeants in his platoon, Stanfield by name.

As the nurse got him some water and fussed over him a bit, Stanfield told him what had happened.   
The explosion that had taken John down was one of the last gasp of resistance on the part of the pirates. They'd broken and ran, as John had thought they would, and the militia sergeants had maintained an organized pursuit down the service road, and by the time they'd called a halt at the bottom of the hill any of the pirates who might have considered trying to put together another attack were dead.

When the Alliance Marines had dropped, they'd had nothing to do but mop-up and take care of the wounded, which had left all of them somewhat disgruntled. However, the militia had only taken a dozen casualties in the last charge, counting John, and only two had been fatal. Further, everyone inside Halberstam Station was still alive.

The pirates had been somewhat less fortunate. At least half of their casualties had been taken around Halberstam Station, which wasn't especially surprising, and of the more than a thousand pirates who'd landed on Elysium, not one had made it off. Well, no one thought so, anyway. The pirate fleet had been less comprehensively destroyed, but even then more than 80% of the ships had never left the system, and the navy had been concentrating its fire on the better-equipped ones.

In other words, the pirates of the Terminus Systems had been utterly wrecked, and probably wouldn't be an issue for some time to come. Furthermore, their mission, to wreck Elysium and enslave it's inhabitants, had failed miserably, and that had apparently inspired some governments to be a little more aggressive in their anti-piracy activities.

"Which," Stanfield said as he wrapped it all up, "brings us to you. They're calling you "The Hero of Elysium" now. You can't walk outside wearing an Alliance uniform without some newsie sticking a microphone in your face and asking if you know Sergeant Shepard."

John groaned. He hadn't wanted this to happen.

Stanfield smiled wryly. "Don't worry about it, no one holds it against you. Thing is, Alliance brass took notice too. Scuttlebutt says they're going to promote you to Lieutenant, run you through OCS ASAP, and then send you to the N1 program."

John knew that when Stanfield shared something you could count on it, and that nearly got him to sit up--and he would have, if he hadn't been banged up. "Why?"

"In case you've forgotten, you held off a force that--we checked--never outnumbered you by less than two-to-one, and usually outnumbered you by double that, with militia. Not Alliance Marines," that, the two men knew, would be expected against pirates, "But militia. Alliance isn't going to let that kind of command ability stay at the noncom level.

"As to the N1 program--John, you really don't get just how outstanding you are, physically and mentally. No, you're not the best at anything, but you're in the top five to ten for EVERYTHING."

John blinked. "Really?"

"Yeah. And honestly, that's what they want in the N program, is good all-arounders. I heard someone use the words "a Ph.d who can take a krogan headbutt" when describing their ideal. I've seen your scores. You're ready for it."

That was reassuring, anyway. "Oh, also," Stanfield added casually, "they're putting you in for a few medals as well."

"Medals?" John asked suspiciously.

"Medals. I think I heard something about the Star of Terra..."

"WHAT?!?

* * *

The next several weeks weren't fun for John Shepard at all. While he was able to get out of the hospital less than two days after regaining consciousness--ah, the wonders of medi-gel--he had to spend the next several days dealing with brass, newsies, and paperwork.

The brass alternated between helpful and annoying. The media and public relations people didn't have a clue what it was like to be on the battlefield, honestly didn't seem to want to know, and were either intimidated by him or condescended to him (though in several cases they would not have minded doing some hands-on media work with him). Even so, following their advice he was able to avoid finding out what his shoe tasted like. Meanwhile, the actual command officers didn't push him much and left him his space, though they did seem to all at least want to be seen with him, and they did their level best to smooth out the paperwork for him. It was amazing what having a major yelling at you could do for expediting a transfer form.

The newsies were uniformly annoying, with a couple of exceptions. The questions they asked were either insipid or intensely personal, with virtually no middle ground, and no matter how hard he tried to talk about the men and women he'd led and what they'd done (he was particularly effusive in his praise of Sergeant Correia, the former sergeant major who'd led the defense of the other road to Halberstam Station, and then taken over after John had been rendered hors de combat) they kept coming back to him. The only ones who weren't annoying, actually, were a couple of turians who'd obviously seen the elephant, had been very polite, focused on the battle itself rather than his feelings about it, and who had actually taken his advice to interview Correia. He'd actually learned a lot from that interview, though the sergeants description of him left him somewhat flustered when he read it.

Granted, some of his irritation with the newsies was born of worry. The last thing he wanted was for his preferences to get plastered all over the extranet. People understandably found the whole BDSM thing a little weird--there were times he found it a little weird, particularly the S&M part, and he was an active participant in the community--and it would create a slight scandal if it came out. And could cause some issues elsewhere, again for understandable reasons. The line between abuse and kink could be razor thin and was far too easy to cross, which was why there were so many rules and rituals and customs, and responsible club owners were very careful about who they let in.

What John didn't know was that the people at the Earthy Library and the Shellback had agreed that anyone who outed John Shepard would be blackballed anywhere and everywhere. And that could happen, too--everyone in the community understood the value of discretion, and the importance of just being able to slough off what you were outside and be someone else for awhile. John's secret was safe with them--especially since he'd mailed the Carrs and told them that he wouldn't be there for a little while, because he didn't want to draw them any unwanted attention. They appreciated that.

Third, and finally, he was also taking six hours of college courses. The Alliance had largely drawn from the United North American States' traditions regarding promoting enlisted men to officers, and part of that was that the person in question had to have a four-year college degree. No exceptions. Fortunately, John's last two years of high school on Earth had all been dual enrollment, he'd taken a few distance-learning courses while he was on active duty, and when the word came down from on high that he was to go to OCS he'd been immediately ordered to take several college credit tests (all of which he passed, though not always with flying colors). However, even the college that the Alliance military had specifically set up for such circumstances (when you recruited species-wide, the variance in educational systems could be...considerable...And the Alliance wasn't going to delay good officer material any more than it had to, given that it was expanding the military as quickly as it dared) wasn't going to be buffaloed into lowering it's standards, and John was six hours short of what he needed for the "General Bachelor's" degree.

At any rate, all of this simply meant that he didn't have a moment to rest and barely had time to decompress at all. Quite honestly, even after hearing about how much of a pain OCS was, he was almost eager for it. At least that would involve things he actually enjoyed doing and something of a set schedule instead of running around all over the place.

As it happened, he was right. Phase one, which was the first two months and consisted of equal parts classroom lecture and hands-on training, was a breeze for him. Admittedly, the spit-and-polish parts were a bit of a pain, but making things shiny was the sort of thing he could let his mind wander doing. The academics weren't that tough, and the leadership and tactical portions were almost second-nature to him.

Phase two was tougher, but the previous two months had given him the chance to finally process everything that had happened on Elysium, and he'd laid his ghosts to rest. As a result, the month-long hands-on training session was some of the most fun he'd ever had in his life. Grueling, exhausting, dirty, march forty klicks with a fifty-pound ruck in two days and have a firefight at the end while running on four hours of sleep fun, but fun nonetheless.

John would freely concede that his idea of fun was a little odd, but he liked pushing himself.

He graduated at the top of the class, then spent a month on TDY at Fort Benning to rest and recuperate before going to Rio de Janeiro for N1 training.

If it seems like John was being put on the fast track for promotion and advancement, there were two reason for that. First, the Alliance military was in an expansionary period. Time-in-service and time-in-grade requirements were not nearly as long as they had been in Western militaries around the turn of the millennium. 

The second reason was that he was being fast-tracked.

After David Anderson's scapegoating at the hands of Saren Arterius, the Alliance had decided that the next time they put up a candidate for the Spectres, they were going to be the very best that humanity had to offer. Not that Anderson had been at all second-rate, mind, but the fact was that while he was among the best of the best, he was not among the best of the best of the best. That not even one of those would have been able to avoid having done to them what had been done to Anderson, barring the possession of clairvoyant abilities, was entirely lost on the Alliance brass.

The first attempt to do this, which was something of a rogue op involving falsified college records and psych profiles, involved using a man named Kai Leng, and had ended somewhat poorly when he was arrested, shortly after completing the N7 course, for first-degree murder. After that, the people in charge of such things had decided to make sure that the next one they tried had gone through all the proper channels and was mentally stable.

As it happened, they'd gone over John's life with a fine-toothed comb, and knew all about his...predilections. However, he was discrete about them, no one had any complaints, and he didn't let them control him. They could work with that. Also, the trauma from Mindoir combined with the victory at Elysium were excellent motivators.

To no one's surprise except perhaps his own, John passed the N1 training with flying colors, since it was essentially extreme combat training, and he'd already faced most of the challenges--lack of sleep and food, being shot at, and having to adapt, improvise, and overcome--in the real world, on multiple occasions. This was despite the training cadre deliberately making it harder for him than for the other candidates, not because they wanted him to fail but because they wanted to see how he'd do, and the slight issue that he'd never trained or fought in a tropical environment before. He still scored at the top of the class.

By coincidence, it was the right time of year and there were enough available candidates to set up an N2 class right afterwards, and so John spent a month at the Vila Militar on TDY before going off to Antarctica for training in extreme cold weather, mountain, and water environments, and in jetpack maneuvers. The saying was that if you could control yourself in the air in an Antarctic winter storm you could control yourself anywhere, and John understood why.

He also didn't swim very well (as it turns out, having only about 10% body fat doesn't do either your insulation or your buoyancy much good, something often overlooked due to the fact that it so rarely comes up.) The N2 training would turn out to be his lowest-scoring course in the ICT, and he still made it in the top ten percent of his class.

After that, he was then shipped off to the Skyllian Verge again, though to a different unit than the last time he'd been in the area--Alliance policy was to not assign "mustang" officers to the units where they'd been enlisted as a way to avoid familiarity breeding contempt among the enlisted and potential resentment among the officers if said mustang ended up commanding them--where, as a first lieutenant (his scores in the N1 and N2 programs got him the promotion almost a year earlier than he would have otherwise) he ended up helping to plan and lead a series of operations against those pirates and slavers who'd survived the Skyllian Blitz and And those who'd moved into the power vacuum created by the loss of so many of the biggest names in the business.

As it turned out, he had a good head for analysis and a good grasp of psychology, something that the people at the Shellback could have told the Alliance if they'd bothered to ask. There were a couple of different reasons for this. First, his parents had raised him to try and see things from the perspective others, something which he weaponized when dealing with pirates and the like. Second, unlike most people, he didn't have a dominant love language--rather, he basically had four primary ones and one practically quaternary one (gift-giving, if you must know)--which helped him maintain the mental flexibility needed to analyze such a diverse crowd as the pirates of the Terminus Systems and what they were likely to do.

The unit he was assigned to, therefore, had an extraordinary run of success for about a year before John was voluntold that he was going to N3 training, dealing with desert, volcanic, and tropical environments, was held in the Congo, the Kalahari, and Hawaii, and lasted for about three months, to be followed by N4 training if he passed the former. The N4 training was held around the moons of Jupiter and Arcturus station, and was the longest course in the program, almost a year, largely because it involved some serious cross-training. The Alliance military very much emphasized interoperability between its branches, though the Navy was very much the senior service, as it was among the Asari though not the Turians or Salarians, and with soldiers like John who were expected to carry out covert missions it was considered wise that they know how to command ships, at least small ones, while officers who'd come up through the naval side needed to know how to handle ground combat. No one was going to expect a ground-pounder graduate of the ICT to command a dreadnought or even a cruiser, but a frigate was a different story. The same, of course, went for someone who'd gotten their start in the navy--no one expected such a person to be able to command a battalion or a division, but they should be able to command a company. The N4 program granted its graduates dual rank, one in the Marines and one in the Navy. It was an odd system, but there were few enough graduates of the courses that it didn't really create many problems.

John passed both courses with flying colors, and while they weren't nearly as fun as the N1 and N2 courses, they were definitely engaging, and he found the command exercises to be tremendously valuable, mostly because they taught him that he would never be a truly excellent shiphandler. He just didn't quite have the intuitive grasp of the mechanics of the matter that you needed for that, so if he ever did command a ship he'd really need a good pilot.

After that, he promoted again, this time to Marine captain and Navy senior grade lieutenant, and returned to the Skyllian Verge, where he was assigned to the _Blackthorn_ , a covert operations ship, that needed someone who could fulfill dual roles--there were never enough officers who qualified for that kind of work--and essentially served as the XO, though he ended up leading the ground element on its raids multiple times over the year and a half that he was assigned to the vessel.

As it turned out, he was extraordinarily effective at his job, able to see what needed tweaking and what needed to be left alone, and while the _Blackthorn_ was already a tight ship, John managed to make it even tighter without causing any real friction, and the unit's combat efficiency, already high and therefore difficult to increase, went up even further. Such things were noticed by the higher-ups, and bid fair for John's military career.

It should be noted that John's sex life had been mostly conspicuous by its absence, though it wasn't as though he didn't have friends. As mentioned, he didn't do casual, and his time off was infrequent enough that he wasn't sure if any woman would be willing to do anything but casual. He also didn't really do porn, either, for reasons having to do with a particularly sick Batarian labor camp overseer whose productions were would have even been illegal on Ilium, so when he returned to Elysium the second time he was in a state best described as "perpetual sexual frustration."

Fortunately for him, the first night he poked his head into the Earthy Library he met Elena Rodriguez, whose sexual and romantic appetites were peculiar, in the sense that she could go for weeks or months without any kind of sexual or romantic affection, but while she was with someone she was well-nigh insatiable. However, once sated, she was quite content to go without again for weeks or months.

She was also a sub, which made her the perfect woman for John at this point in his life.

They hit it off, and things went much as they had between him and Maddie--they liked each other, they were sexually attracted to each other, and while neither was sure if a long-term relationship was in the cards they were willing to see where it went.

Over the course of that year and a half, John managed to see her about once a month or so, usually for a long weekend that turned into a marathon sex-and-cuddling session. While he was aboard the _Blackthorn_ they exchanged messages back and forth--text only, no video. Shortly before he was called out for the N5 and N6 training, though, he realized that this was not what he wanted out of a relationship--Elena might be content with doing things this way, but he kind of wanted something where they were walking beside each other, not this...whatever it was. It was fun, Elena was nice, but a long-term relationship was just not in the cards, and he was trying to figure out how he was going to break up with her when he was informed that he was going to be transferred out for at least a year.

Much as with Maddie, his breakup with Elena was amicable, though in this case the parting sex session lasted for nearly a week and broke her bed, and the Earthy Library threw him a nice going-away party that was also something of a belated thank-you for Halberstam station.

And with that, he headed off to training. N5 training was the second-longest course in the sequence--a four-month long training exercise that sent the participants trekking across land, air, sea, and space from Earth to Shanxi, dealing with hostile terrain, hostile weather, simulated enemy attacks, equipment breakdowns, intermittently inadequate food and sleep, and feast-and-famine supply situations.

John, quite honestly, had the time of his life, and it was almost a letdown when they made it to their final objective on Shanxi and took it.

Once he was done with that, he got two months of TDY to the Vila Militar, again, followed by promotions to Marine major and Navy lieutenant commander, whereupon he was sent to N6 training, the third-longest course in the sequence--which was training in zero-g and extravehicular space survival and combat, culminating in an exercise in which all the remaining trainees were dropped on an asteroid with no nav data and only as much oxygen as they had in their suits, and which lasted until everyone ran out of air. John wasn't the last, but he wasn't far off from it.

It was a rule that in order to receive the N7 designation, one had to engage in actual combat. It was rare for anyone to make it all the way to N6 without doing so, but it did happen on occasion. In this case, however, all of the graduating members of the class had seen combat, which meant that, in addition to the automatic promotion--in his case, to Marine colonel and Navy commander--they got for completing the N6 course, they also had the N7 graduation ceremony, which was held on Shanxi.

The reason for this was quite simple. As the only human world that had been successfully occupied by an alien power, Shanxi was a symbol of what the Alliance military was supposed to prevent. "Shanxi will not fall again" was the watchword of the N program, a goal that John privately added "and neither will Mindoir" to. Elysium had laid his ghosts to rest, but he still visited the grave every now and again.

That done, he was then informed that he was to report to the SSV Normandy, a classified stealth frigate developed in cooperation with the Turian Hierarchy, as Captain David Anderson's XO. He was looking forward to it--having stealth capability would make raiding the Batarians and their stooges much easier. And Anderson was a legend. Yes, this would be an excellent assignment.

**A/N: I know that no real-world military does that kind of dual-rank nonsense. Blame Bioware and its decision to give a marine a naval rank, something that is not in the traditions of most militaries, especially the ones the Systems Alliance would mostly be drawing from, which meant I had to come up with some kind of explanation for it, and this was the best explanation I could come up with.**


End file.
